Now that I think about it, color has a tremendous impact and design in my work life. I can remember '...

Now that I think about it, color has a tremendous impact and design in my work life. I can remember 'way back when' in the beginning of my corporate life and I hoarded highlighters and pens.

Before digital PDAs or iPads I was a compulsive note-taker and used a DayTimer. My entire professional life was organized in those things! I also carried around multiple highlighters to categorize my notes. Yellow was for important information, green was for phone numbers, pink was for dates/deadlines, and blue was for people's names.

Every day I wrote the date and day of week under the previous day's notes and drew a box around it so I could flip through quickly and find a dated piece of information. I can't even tell you how many times I'd be talking to someone that 'forgot' that they had mentioned something (or missed a deadline) and I'd pull out my trusty DayTimer all marked up like a crazy rainbow and show them my exact notes.

Color sticky notes weren't really on the market then, but I had my own system for using those as well. And I was crazy about marking all my paper file folders with color codes so I could easily pull information, or direct others to do the same - with ease.

To this day I'm borderline addicted to Sharpies and own probably 30 colors in various styles.

I really wish there was some way to duplicate my efficiency digitally like my system from the 80s/90s. I know you can just search information in digital notes, but, like the article says, there is something systematic and comforting about thinking with color.